Balancing in the Middle
For a while there was a trend of providing a moral choice to players: The choice between Good and Evil. My understanding is that this idea probably started with Ultima IV in 1985 – but when I think about “moral…
Tag Morality Systems
Everhood: False Endings, Truths, Choices, and Hope
This essay is almost entirely about spoilers for the game Everhood. If this is a game you intend to play, I would recommend doing so before reading this. It’s a pretty neat game, and I would cautiously recommend it, although…
Playgrounds of Choice
In a traditional narrative medium, moral choice often enters in when a character discovers they can do something that goes against their beliefs to gain some sort of an advantage or object of desire. The audience may perceive the character…
Playing Roles
Games have a weird relationship with morality. For a while, many were including ham-fisted ‘morality systems’ – absurd contrivances where you were presented with two exaggerated choices, choosing between senseless slaughter and saintly forgiveness, and then assigned to be good…
Gray Areas
In games, actions have consequences. This is broadly true in all cases: The game is defined by its reactions to the actions you take within its spaces. However, when we talk about games – and when games talk about themselves…
Response
Games are, generally, engines for responding to player input. Whether the game feels good is largely a matter of how robust the response is – robust both in how closely it interacts with the player’s input and in how well-constructed…